No matter what your opinion is of Pete Rose, his name is as synonymous with baseball as Ruth, Gehrig, and Aaron. Not only is Rose the all-time leader in hits but, as a player, he has won more games than any other player in any sport. The baseball legend has proven to be a winner, and has instilled that same kind of tenacity and fire into his children, including current Wichita Wingnuts Manager Pete Rose, Jr.

Rose, Jr. never reached the status of his father on the field, but did play professional baseball for 21-seasons, and has managed in the Chicago White Sox organization as well as in the American Association. With a baseball legend as his father and as great of a love of the game as any kid you will find in little league, the junior Rose has established that he has as much credential to speak on the game of baseball as any player, manager, executive, or reporter you will find.

Pete Rose, Jr. loves the game of baseball, but when he was asked recently on his podcast show, Fan Interference, to rebuke a man’s friend who said that football is much better than baseball, Pete could only agree – football is better. Why does Pete think so? “Baseball is boring,” he declared. This is the son of a man who was declared as one of the greatest players who ever stepped between the lines and, yet, he sees the problem of why baseball is slowly losing traction with American audiences – it simply isn’t as exciting as football.

Major League Baseball Is Changing with the Times

Newly ordained MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred agrees. Over the last two seasons he has taken steps to make the game more exciting, focusing most of his attention on speeding up the game. This has included the league adding a 30-second count between pitches and a player receiving an intentional walk without the pitcher having to throw a pitch. These results have created some success (average games dropped from 3:02:21 in 2014 to 3:00:42 last season), yet more is needed to be done.

In a society where people want microwave food, DVRs to edit out commercials, and 24-hour news, sports, and even cooking shows, the attention span of the general public has decreased more than ever. This is the dilemma that faces baseball, because it is truly a three-minute game that is played in three-hours. The action is limited in terms of what actually goes on during games, and that flies directly in the face of millennials and others who want constant action.

Battling the Traditionalists

Interestingly enough, Rose, Jr. does not like the rules implemented by Major League Baseball. He agrees that the game is “boring,” but is a traditionalist in terms of the way that the game is played. This is the challenge that the sport faces. While there is a need to speed up games, there are also a large number of people who love baseball the way that it is. They explain that if commercials are decreased between innings, something that will never happen, then the game would drop to 2:45 or even less.

The problem with this thinking is that commercials are not the only thing that is keeping games longer. If you have been to a minor league or independent league game recently then you know that commercials are far from the real issue. Games regularly last three-plus hours, even going as long as four hours for a regulation 9-inning game. There has to be something else going on here.

Hitters take forever to get ready for each pitch. If anyone saw former Texas Rangers prospect and St. Paul Saint Ian Gac at the plate, they would get why games take so long. After each pitch, the former slugger would readjust his wrist bands, fix his helmet, and dig back in at the plate. It was a ritual that helped his timing, but clearly set off the timing of the game.

He is not alone. It seems that every player has some kind of ritual when they step to the plate and if the pitcher dare do something to throw off the timing of that ritual, then the batter will start all over. It is the psychology part of the game intended to get into the head of the opposing player, but all it really does is make a fan base that needs to go to work in the morning bored and ready to leave after the seventh inning. At the rate this is going the seventh inning stretch will have to be moved to the fifth inning just to keep fans around.

What Can Be Done

Major League Baseball is making what some traditionalists feel are “drastic” changes to speed up and improve the game, but rule changes need to go beyond the Big Leagues. All minor leagues need to impose these rules, as do the four major independent leagues (American, Can-Am, Atlantic, and Frontier). All the players in the independent and minor leagues are looking to make it the Big Show one day, so they might as well start learning the dance now. If not, what will they do when they reach the Majors?

However, something still needs to be done about the length of games, even at the Major League level. In an article on MyTopSportsBook.com, Perry Port addresses this very issue. He addresses five possible rule changes that would speed the game up. His ideas during regulation are sound ones.

Batters don’t need timeouts once they step into the box. This is nothing more than a stall tactic and as the author puts it, “Umpires need to stop granting so many time outs (how about three per game?), and a batter should not be able to leave the box after every time he swings at a pitch.” That’s just a common sense idea.

The number of pitching changes allowed per inning is also something that needs to change. This is an area where Tony LaRussa ruined the game. He developed these specialist roles for his Oakland Athletics pitchers, and this has led to three and four pitching changes per inning.

Port proposes allowing no more than two pitching changes in any one inning, including making a new pitcher to start an inning count as one of those pitching changes. That makes a lot of sense, and is one area where the American Association is ahead of MLB. It is not that the league limits the number of pitchers entering into the game in an inning but, since a team only has 22 men on their roster, there are not a lot of extra arms to waste. They simply can’t afford to waste four or five guys in one game. While the Players’ Union would fight this to the death, maybe a decrease in the number of players on a roster would be a huge step forward.

The one area where the article goes off the track a bit is in relation to extra-innings. Commissioner Manfred has proposed using the International Rule, where each team starts with a runner on second base to begin their half of the inning, but the strategy in this scenario is grossly unfair. The American Association implemented this rule two seasons ago and abandoned it a year later because it took all the strategy out of the game.

Former Winguts Manager Kevin Hooper, now the roving minor league infield instructor for the San Diego Padres, explained that this rule totally favors the visiting team. As Hooper explained, the visiting team can simply bunt the runner over, play for the sacrifice fly, and then use their closer in the bottom half of the inning and the game is over. The home team does not get that opportunity because they don’t want to waste their closer in a tie game.

Truly, not many fans are sitting around for a 17-inning affair. When it is 3 A.M, and you are still watching a baseball game your next stop should either be a counselor’s office or maybe even a divorce lawyer’s office since your wife is going to be outraged that you came home so late from a baseball game.

As an alternative, Port suggests that a game that is tied after 12-innings stay that way. There is no doubt that purists will lose their mind over this suggestion. They are still outraged that the 2002 All-Star game ended in a draw, and you would think that a major sin has occurred because the game ended with no winner. The question really needs to be, “Is a tie really that big of a deal?” There are a half a dozen of them in the NFL each season and no one seems to care that much, so why is it so big in baseball?

The answer to that is tradition. Many will say that baseball is the purest of sports because it is essentially the same game that was played 125 years ago, but that is not really true at all. There is a DH now, the mound that has been raised and lowered, better gloves, shorter distances for homeruns, changes in how pitchers are used (Cy Young won 511 games and lost 311; will any three pitchers have that many total decisions anymore?), and there are hundreds of new statistical categories that have been added, and most people would tell you that the game is better because of these adjustments.

Consider that in the 2013, a record for extra-inning games, fewer than 20 went more than 12-innings. That means that out of 2,430 games played, less than 20 would have ended in a tie. Is that really a reason to be thinking the sky is falling?

When you have a man from one of the most iconic baseball families in history calling the game boring then there is reason to be concerned. Maybe all of Port’s suggestions are not the way to go, but he is onto something here. If the game does not make some drastic changes and at all levels of the sport, the next generation may be saying that baseball in America is past its time.

By Robert Pannier